Blog standards

February 16, 2010 9:34 PM

Blogger is ending its FTP service next month. I have a problem about moving some or all of my postings into a Wordpress blog. The issue also involves a question about RSS.

A blog I began in 2001 is still running on Old Blogger and updating via FTP. The FTP service is soon being discontinued and I'm letting this nudge me into moving my blog to Wordpress.

It's upwards of 5000 entries but I don't need to convert all of them – in fact I'd be happy with the 200 or so entries made in 2010 as an archive. But Wordpress is picky. It won't import from Old Blogger, so I converted some of the blog entries to New Blogger.

Then Blogger wouldn't pull those entries because we didn't have the right flavour of ssl running, so it wasn't any good having the entries in New Blogger format anyway.

Wordpress says it can import RSS 2.0, but it won't go get the entries from a URL. You have to have the RSS file saved locally, and upload it.

I have not been able to figure this one out, as RSS feeds are not normally a thing you download en masse. I'm on OS X and have tried all the standard feed readers, and none of them allow for downloading a chunk of RSS xml in a single file, and that's the one thing I need to do.

I have that niggling feeling I'm overlooking something glaringly obvious here, so don't hesitate to tell me if I am.

posted by zadcat to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

RSS feeds are a thing you normally download en masse. It's basically how RSS works. You can use something like wget on a RSS url and it should download the RSS xml as a single file.
posted by pwnguin at 9:51 PM on February 16, 2010

Try using curl, which is built into OS X and available via the Terminal application:

$ curl http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml -o blogname.rssfeed.xml
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:53 PM on February 16, 2010

In firefox, at least, you can navigate directly the RSS feed URL and do a 'save as' (for example). But that will only do the last N entries, where N is the size of the RSS feed.


I just now went into an old blogger blog I had setup to see if there was a way to export it or set the feed size. And there does appear to be a way to download the entire blog as an atom feed.


Just log into blogger. Under "manage blogs" there should be a little box with info on your blog. Click "Settings" then click "Export Blog" under "Blog Tools"


There's a big button that says "Download blog". It gives you an XML file which is Atom format.

However, atom and RSS are not he same thing, but there seem to be plenty of converters
posted by delmoi at 10:14 PM on February 16, 2010

I had that same exact problem earlier today when I decided to finally move my old blogger blog to a wordpress one. This page did the trick for me, with the blogger2wordpress app link.
posted by lifeaskew at 10:56 PM on February 16, 2010

Best answer: I found that the real problem with this was that 5000 posts was like way too much. I cut the xml file down in size and now it's fine. Thanks all.
posted by zadcat at 12:55 PM on February 17, 2010